Timber Timbre – Hot Dreams

Canadians Timber Timbre return to tell another sobering and unnerving tale, Taylor Kirk’s brooding croon serving as a glimmering torch through the moody and unsettling atmosphere, a forest of haunting memories and forgotten terrors.

Opening proceedings is the comfortingly familiar ‘Beat The Drum Slowly’, a sorrowful tale of a “celebrity century” at a marching pace that gently descends from a lullaby tone into a stuttering electronic seizure. It’s as if Dean Martin and Radiohead have spent winter together in a bunker and emerged thoroughly depressed, with writing this song as all that kept them going. Title track ‘Hot Dreams’ marks the largest departure for Timber Timbre, trading in the funeral folk for lustful blues and saxophone solos. However its awkward and oddly seedy lyrics, “I want to dance with a black woman” or “Hot streams, hot streams, will fork and divide” lend it a signature creepiness, intended or not.

Normal service is resumed with the brooding and shadowy ‘Curtains?!’ that celebrates its choppy guitar lines by adding a swirling synth. While Kirk’s voice is perhaps the band’s greatest asset it’s impressive to note how some of the instrumental moments of the album resonate longest as a few of its most rewarding highlights. That point is really driven home by ‘Resurrection Drive Part II’, which in abandoning the vocals manages to deliver an undercurrent of icy post-punk that Bauhaus would be proud of with all sorts of interesting touches on the surface. The album has one of its brightest shining jewels in its crown with the bluesy and hypnotising ‘This Low Commotion’ and later a sinister beast lurking in the background is front and centre for the effortlessly eerie ‘Run From Me’.

Kirk’s irresistible vocals lend the album all the quality it needs, and their lighter touches and some inspired choices really add depth to the monochromatic and claustrophobic formula. The title track sticks out like a sexually-adventurous sore thumb and each listener may take their own seduction or revulsion from that, which seems suitably fitting for the band making the proposition. Aside from that it’s a moonlit stroll through dark and intimidating territory, but with the wanderer in question so beautifully entranced that the journey is all that matters.